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September 4: Family Farmers Plead for No New Doha Round (09.04.09). As trade ministers meet in New Delhi, India today to revive the WTO Doha Round, the National Family Farm Coalition today denounced efforts to further liberalize agricultural markets. Ben Burkett, a Mississippi farmer and NFFC president, said, “We need more food sovereignty, not more free trade. Millions of Mexican farmers have been driven off their land due to the below-cost dumping of corn by U.S. agribusinesses. Now they are working as farmworkers here in the U.S., often working in intolerable conditions.” Burkett also rejected the U.S. government’s demand for more “market access” to developing countries: “Market access is simply a poisonous code for gutting local food systems and family farmers. Countries will now be flooded with imported processed food made from genetically modified commodities. Thanks to the WTO, many countries’ food security is now dependent on highly speculative global markets. This was the root cause of many of the food riots in 2008.”